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Posted by john copeman ontario can. on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 05:44:10 :
I was amazed to see the the holy grail of parts pictured here on the site overseas>This lead me to do some thinking here>After the second world war we were in a cold war mentality >Milatary spending and budgets were big and the fear of eastern europe erupting in to a global nuclear war lead to a surplus building of milatary and quasi milatary equipment>Untold amounts of equipment and a tremendous back up of parts were stock pile globaly>I can recall that after the late 50s and early sixtys much of this equipment was liquidated ,some as government surplus and so on >Most of the equipment was sold zero miles or hours!I can tell you personaly of one company in toronto that bought almost every milatary piece they could find >When i say every thing i mean everthing from bulldozers to tires, power wagons ,tanks, wcs, duks ,name it>George in alberta can back me up here, he worked only a mile from it >It was Levys there yard was 10 acres of every thing ,there ware house (early walmart size savvy)had every thing and i am talkng one big mother of a ware house >Plus they had a large repair shop to repair and refit for resale what they sold>On occasion they would sell off there surplus willys jeeps 700$,power wagons 1000$ duece and a halfs (new)1500$ bren gun carriers 200$ and so on>In to the late sixtys Levys were world wide shipping to foreign countrys >It was such a global bussines that thay had locations around the world, parts unlimited if they didnt have it for you they would soon get it for you >Eventually they became dealers in arms a definate no no !rocket lauchers,field artilary small arms , fighter air craft ect>When they got popped for arms dealing ,the entire inventory world wide was siezed .It vanished like a virgin on prom night !gone !where it all went is still a major mystery> It took almost a year to empty the yard and the ware house on weston road and god only knows how many locations "world wide they had"> IT was was said that they had over 750,000,000 just in parts alone! so may be this will shed some light on how this stuff just pops up from time to time>The reason i know so much about this that when i started my first truck repair shop , i had a Levy brother as a partner >He fronted much of the cash and had connections to buying whole fleets of trucks and equipment>We made a fortune taking trucks piggy backed out west in the 70s boom >Gone are the those days
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